Five Ways to Die a Slow Death
by Annakovsky
Summary: Five things that never happened to Giles.


SUMMARY: Five things that never happened to Giles.   
  
SPOILERS: Through the season 6 episode "Tabula Rasa".   
  
RATING: R for language and violence.   
  
DISCLAIMER: All characters, settings, universe, etc, belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.  
  
ARCHIVING: Probably, but ask first so I know where it is.  
  
NOTES: This is a response to the Five Things challenge. Thanks to Kita, who I believe first suggested this very popular idea, and to all the wonderful authors who've done such an excellent job with it in the past. This is my own humble attempt.  
  
FEEDBACK: Please! Send to annakovsky@hotmail.com  
  
**********  
  
Five Ways to Die a Slow Death  
  
by Annakovsky  
  
**********  
  
1. Devotion (Becoming, s2)  
  
Just before school started, Giles got another lead, this time that she was in LA. He was on the road within the hour, only pausing to tell Willow and Xander where he was going. They looked at him pityingly, but didn't attempt to convince him not to bother. "Good luck!" Willow said with a forced cheer; he nodded and picked up his bag. That was the last time he saw them.   
  
Buffy was not pleased to find him on her doorstep.   
  
"What are you doing here?" she asked grimly as he pushed past her, afraid she would shut the door in his face.  
  
"Buffy..." he started.  
  
"Don't call me that," she interrupted. He nodded, slowly.   
  
"I'm so glad you're all right. Won't you come home?"   
  
"No."   
  
"Your friends miss you, your mother..."  
  
"I don't care." Her expression was completely closed off, forbidding and unhappy. He looked at her softly, trying to reach her, his Slayer.  
  
"We do," he said. "I do."  
  
"Well," she said, her eyes flat. "That was your first mistake." He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away.  
  
**  
  
She refused to return to Sunnydale, and he refused to leave without her. The stalemate lasted two weeks before the gang of vampires came for her, wanting a Slayer kill to boost their reputations.  
  
She won, of course, but not until they had burned down her apartment complex and killed the stray cat she'd been feeding. She stared at the wreckage and at the small furry corpse, emotionless, hard, as if this was what she had been expecting. Then she turned and walked away.   
  
He followed her, caught up and walked beside her, but she didn't acknowledge him. When they got to the bus station, he finally spoke.  
  
"Will you come home now?"   
  
"No," she said curtly, looking at the schedule.  
  
"Think of your mother. Think of Willow and Xander. They need you. They love you."  
  
"Exactly," she said, turning and walking up to the ticket counter. "One, please."  
  
"Where to?" the agent asked, bored.   
  
"Surprise me," she said, unsmiling. The agent raised her eyebrows, a little annoyed, and after a moment handed a ticket over. Giles moved up to the counter then.  
  
"One of the same," he said. Buffy looked at him contemptuously, almost pityingly.   
  
"Congratulations, Rupert!" she said, in a rather poor imitation of her own old liveliness. "You've just won a trip to Las Vegas. What are you going to do now?"   
  
"I won't leave you," he said quietly.   
  
"Whatever," she muttered, slumping into a molded plastic yellow chair.   
  
**  
  
They moved from place to place, staying in cheap hotels, tenement houses and abandoned buildings. It was a strange day if Giles didn't witness a drug deal, and a stranger one if they didn't fight a demon trying to make a meal of the weak and expendable, the people no one cared about. Sunnydale seemed as far away as the beautiful people on the tattered advertisements pasted to the subway walls, their glossy smiles completely irrelevant to anything in his existence.   
  
He didn't wear tweed anymore, as it was a good way to get your ass kicked in the kind of life they now led. Instead he wore jeans so filthy he was surprised every morning they hadn't gotten up and walked off on their own, a t-shirt that had originally been white, a leather jacket he had somehow picked up along the way. He barely recognized himself when he looked in the mirror. Or recognized himself all too well. His accent slipped down a few notches, adopted the slurred, dangerous tones of his youth. He reclaimed his attitude of constant intimidation and the full willingness to back up threats with violence.   
  
Buffy looked at him almost admiringly when he slammed a punk kid's head into a brick wall, and he hated himself a little more every day.   
  
**  
  
She called him Rupes, when she called him anything at all, in an insolent tone full of derision. And he called her Anne, since she nearly bashed his teeth in when he called her Buffy. She insisted love was weakness, and showed no weakness herself. But even so, she never gave him the slip, though she had many opportunities.  
  
He reminded himself of that during the weeks she didn't speak to him.   
  
Back in the old life, people used to assume that he was her father when they saw them together. Now they assumed he was her pimp. He hated it, but Anne rarely disabused them, sometimes hanging on him suggestively with a cruel smile, daring observers to take issue with their relationship. It was the only time she ever touched him.   
  
Once, when a neighbor in their cinder-block Chicago apartment building gave them a disapproving look in the hallway, Anne (after glaring at the neighbor) grabbed him and kissed him full on the lips. He shoved her, for the first and last time.   
  
"Cunt," he gasped, breathless, shocking himself both with his own anger and with the language that came out of his mouth these days. She smirked at him, eyes dead, lips glossy, then pulled out a stake and went to patrol without another word. He leaned against the wall for a moment before trudging after her.  
  
After all, that was what he did. And he wouldn't leave her.   
  
**********  
  
2. Obligation (Band Candy, s3)  
  
Three weeks after the band candy incident, he and Joyce still hadn't managed to say more than two words to one another. So he was surprised when she appeared at his door one Sunday morning.   
  
"I'm late," she said, not meeting his eyes.   
  
"For what?" he asked, idiotically, before he saw the pregnancy test in her hand and realized what she meant. "Oh," he said, at a loss. He stood gaping at her, stock still, for a solid thirty seconds before coming to himself and realizing they were still on the front steps.  
  
"Er, come, come in," he stuttered, opening the door wider. The kettle began to shriek in the kitchen and he moved to quiet it.   
  
**  
  
He proposed four days later, in the African room of the gallery. Joyce looked up, her surprised eyes matching the hollow, empty ones of the mask she was re-labeling.   
  
"What?"   
  
"Er, will you - that is, would you do me the honor of, um, being my... wife?" He focused on a statue just to the left of her, not really seeing it.   
  
Joyce was looking at him earnestly. "You don't have to do this, you know," she said.   
  
"I know," he said, finally looking her in the eye. "Nevertheless."   
  
He honestly didn't expect her to say yes.   
  
**  
  
"You're getting what?" Buffy asked, shocked. "You... what? When? How? How long has this been going on? And just when were you planning on telling me?"  
  
"The ceremony will be soon, we think," Giles said, trying to be reassuring and to focus on questions to which he knew the answers.   
  
"And... Buffy?" Joyce added. "There's one more thing you should know. I know this will be a shock to you, but... I'm pregnant."   
  
"Mom! Ew! Giles!" She looked at him in horror and he looked away, blushing. Buffy looked as though she'd been betrayed. "When... how... no, you know what? I don't even want to know." She slumped in silence, looking revolted, and Giles and Joyce exchanged a look.   
  
"We hope you can be happy for us," Joyce said after a moment.   
  
Buffy's face softened as she looked up, and she summoned a weak smile. "Of course I can."   
  
**  
  
Xander stood up with him as best man, looking strange and very young in a badly fitting suit. They were just in judge's quarters; Joyce didn't wear white. Buffy stood nervously on the other side of her mother, and Giles thought his voice sounded hollow on the vows.   
  
The rest of one's life was a long time.   
  
That night in the hotel room, once Joyce was asleep, he got up to visit the mini-bar. He sat in a chair by the window with his drink, watching the moonlight fall on her face, along her body. His wife, pregnant with their child.  
  
He thought of names. James, perhaps, or David. Charlotte.   
  
Or, more fittingly: Burden. Encumbrance. Duty.  
  
*********  
  
3. Coercion (Who Are You, s4)  
  
They didn't know why, but Buffy changed after Faith had come to town. She seemed harder, more flippant, more hurtful. Even occasionally slipped into Faith's manner of speaking, her characteristic expressions. Giles assumed that this was a natural consequence of the stress of Faith's return, and his theory seemed to pan out as she slowly returned to normal in the following weeks. Soon she was acting like Buffy again, though occasionally her eyes would have a gleam in them they had never had in the past. But he didn't think anything was seriously wrong.   
  
Until that night.   
  
She had come back to his apartment after patrolling to tell him about a demon that had eluded her. She seemed edgy and keyed up, pacing around the room as she gave him the details.   
  
"Buffy, are you all right?" he asked, when she paused for breath. "You seem... tense."   
  
"I am a little wired," she said, shifting her gaze to him. Suddenly she seemed to be sizing him up, looking... predatory, almost. She began walking towards him, hips swinging. "Could use some... release. If you know what I mean."   
  
"What?" She couldn't mean... that. Could she? But she was almost... shimmying and it appeared she was quite serious and shocked really wasn't a strong enough word to describe his frame of mind. Flabbergasted, perhaps. Dumbfounded. As he stood there blinking, she got close enough to put her hands on his chest. Then one of her hands was under his shirt.   
  
"Stop that," he said, inadequately, at a complete loss for words.   
  
"C'mon, Giles, you're my Watcher. You're s'posed to, you know, take care of your Slayer's needs, right?"  
  
"Most certainly not. Besides, I'm not your Watcher anym... WHAT do you think you're doing?" as she went for his crotch.   
  
"Should I translate into British for you?" she asked, grinning a grin that was decidedly not her own. "Shagging, do they call it?" He stared at her, her face suddenly completely unfamiliar.   
  
"Who are you?" he breathed.   
  
"I'm Buffy," she said perkily. "You'd do anything for Buffy, wouldn't you?" And she kissed him, hard, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth.   
  
He tried to extricate himself, with more and more force, but she didn't move. He remembered, with a sinking feeling, just how strong she was.   
  
She had him pinned against the wall, gyrating hips pressing hard up against him as she pulled off her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra.   
  
"Buffy," he gasped. "You don't want to do this."   
  
"Kinda looks like I do, though, doesn't it?" she smirked. "And here I thought you knew me so well." She grasped him through his trousers. "How 'bout that, kinda feels like you want this, too. Always suspected there was something between us."   
  
"Please," he said weakly, blushing and ashamed.   
  
"Knew I could get you to beg for it," she said, grinning wickedly at him and kissing him with bruising force. He closed his eyes in defeat as she pushed him to the floor.   
  
"Look at me," she said, hovering over him. "Giles. Hey, I'm right here. Look at me when I fuck you." And he did, because she was right that he couldn't deny her anything. "That's better," she said. Then he was in her, and God help him, it felt better than almost anything ever had.   
  
When it was over, she got up from the floor and casually pulled her leather pants back on. He lay where she had left him and stared upwards, counting the ceiling tiles.   
  
"Hey G, that wasn't bad. Maybe I'll come back next time I need an itch scratched." Whistling, she walked to the door with a spring in her step. "Later!"   
  
She came back five days later, then three days after that. Soon it was nearly every night. He didn't bother to fight anymore, just walked unhappily to the bedroom when she came in with that look on her face.  
  
Buffy wasn't gentle. Giles told Willow the scratches across his face were from a Hyssop demon, told Xander the bruises on his arms were from a particularly bad vampire attack. After a few weeks they began to shoot him sad, worried looks.   
  
One night as Buffy lay on his chest afterwards, in the short moment before she would get up and leave, he whispered. "I love you."   
  
She laughed. "You're one sick bastard, Rupert." But her voice had a tinge of fear in it, and she left quickly.   
  
The next night she broke his arm.   
  
*********  
  
4. Necessity (The Gift, s5)  
  
When Giles saw Spike plummet sickeningly from the top of the tower, he ran towards the base, desperate to stop the figure above from beginning the ritual. Buffy had knocked Glory off the side of the tower, keeping her busy with Olaf's hammer, so Giles was able to climb all the way to the top of the structure, where a short dark figure was cutting Dawn. The portal was opening below – it was too late. He saw the dimensions shift, begin to melt together, and he knew what had to be done.  
  
"Giles!" Dawn called, and the man cutting her spun. Demon, actually, dark eyes. Giles had seen how fast he had moved against Spike, how quickly he had dispatched the vampire.  
  
Giles pulled a gun from his waistband and fired it quickly into the demon, who kept approaching. Then he aimed a little higher. "I'm sorry," he murmured, and shot Dawn between the eyes.   
  
The demon cried out in fury and turned back to Giles, who emptied the remainder of the magazine into him until he staggered to his knees. Then with a kick, Giles sent him over the side of the tower.   
  
Dawn's blood was still dripping horribly from her gaping head wound, so the portal had not yet closed. A dragon winged its way out and flew overhead, and other evil-looking things were beginning to crawl along the ground. He untied Dawn's body tenderly from where it hung and dropped it into the rift, which closed instantly. Her body fell through to the ground.   
  
He had her blood all over him, covering his hands and shirt. It was warm and sticky, contrasting the cold gun in his hand, the slick heft of metal. He knew he had saved the world. He knew that Buffy would never forgive him. He knew Quentin Travers would probably promote him. He knew that first of all he was going to vomit.   
  
Afterwards, he made his way wearily down the stairs to the bottom, where he hung back. The Scoobies were gathering around Dawn's body.   
  
He watched them all from a distance, absorbing the details. Xander's stance, solid and dependable; the precise red of Willow's hair. The childlike way Anya leaned her head on Xander's shoulder, Tara's gentle arm around Willow's waist, comforting. Spike's sobs, sharp and severe like the rest of him.   
  
And Buffy, standing straight, in shock. He didn't have a good view of her face, but he knew how it would look, grief and betrayal and anger. He memorized her profile, loving her, in this last moment he would be permitted to do so. Before she turned to look at him.   
  
He would have let her kill him when she rushed him. He was prepared. But she let Xander stop her, not able to kill Giles the way he'd killed her sister. Much good it did him.  
  
That evening, Willow and Xander came by his apartment, where he sat in the dark, alone. He still smelled of smoke from burning his bloodied clothes.   
  
"How is she? Buffy?" he asked when he opened the door to find them there. They shook their heads mutely. He nodded, his throat closing. They came in, but didn't sit down.   
  
"We just wanted to... you know. See how you were," Willow said, in the high-pitched, childish voice she reverted to when she didn't know how to cope with life.   
  
Giles smiled grimly. "I've had better days." He sat on the arm of the sofa, suddenly feeling much too tired to stand.   
  
"I know you did what you had to," Xander said. "I know you saved all of us. I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision." Willow glanced at Xander nervously, looking like she knew what was coming and wished it wasn't.   
  
"But?" Giles asked.  
  
"I don't know if I can really look at you right now."  
  
Giles closed his eyes, seeing brains explode out the back of Dawn's head, her face with a ragged gaping hole.   
  
"I understand," he said. He saw Dawn's body sagging from the ropes, felt her blood seeping through his clothes to his skin. Under his skin, guilt reaching down into his cells.   
  
No one said anything for quite some time.   
  
"Go," Giles said finally. "Buffy needs you."   
  
**  
  
Buffy of course refused to see him. Giles suspected that she refused to have his name mentioned, though Willow would never confirm that. He returned to England within the month.   
  
"I'd like to tell her good-bye," he said to Willow, the afternoon before he left. She and Tara stood in the midst of his boxes, a beam of sunlight catching their hair and making bright halos around their heads. He stood in darkness, leaning against the wall.   
  
"I... don't think that would be a good idea," Willow said, apologetic. Giles nodded, focusing on the corner of an empty bookcase.   
  
"Right," he said slowly.   
  
"Maybe someday... it won't be like this anymore," Willow said, trying to be optimistic.   
  
"Perhaps," he said, not believing. "If she asks, tell her I...." He trailed off.  
  
"What?" Tara asked.   
  
"It doesn't matter," he said softly. "She won't ask." The women looked uncomfortable, but didn't contradict him.   
  
He left the next morning, early, with no fanfare, no one to see him off. Alone, he took a taxi to the airport. Alone, he watched Sunnydale recede out the plane window, the university campus, the burnt out old high school, the town proper with cemeteries scattered throughout it.   
  
In England he took a position in research, working in the basement of one of the Council's libraries, cross-indexing and collating. It was silent there, alone with the books and manuscripts, dark and empty. He had no colleagues. Certainly no one ever bounced in to announce a new demon to fight, or to call him "G-man."   
  
The smell of his office reminded him of a few of the older crypts in Sunnydale, the musty odor of age and disuse, of silence and past decay. A place where nothing happened, where the dead went to rest.   
  
He couldn't stand to look at himself, so there were no mirrors in his apartment. His curtains were nearly always closed.   
  
*********  
  
5. Falsehood (Tabula Rasa, s6)  
  
His wife was out meeting with a supplier (she had quite a knack for business), so he had the shop to himself for once, in quiet. He was re-shelving some books when the door opened, jangling the bell and, somehow, his nerves. All the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.   
  
He turned to see a slender, dark-haired man coming towards him. "May I help you?" Rupert asked politely.   
  
"Why Ripper, of course you can," the man almost purred, smiling sardonically. "How nice not to be greeted with violence, for once. Though let's not make a habit of it."  
  
The voice awoke a familiar sensation in his stomach, something like fear, or excitement, or anger. The hated feelings of distant familiarity had become less frequent over the six months since they'd all woken in the shop, unable to remember. They had worked to build a new life, and he had thought there were few surprises left.   
  
"I'm sorry," he said. "And you are...?"   
  
"Now really, Ripper, is that kind?" the man asked, looking cynically amused. When Rupert maintained his air of polite confusion, the man looked a bit closer, searching his face. "You've forgotten," he said thoughtfully.   
  
"Yes, I'm afraid I suffered a bout of amnesia some time ago. We knew each other, did we?"   
  
"Yes," the man murmured. "Rather well." He began rolling up his left sleeve. "Ethan," he said. He displayed a black tattoo marking his forearm, looking at Rupert carefully. "I burned it off once, but it always comes back."  
  
Rupert stared at the mark, beginning to feel twinges in his own forearm, in its twin. The tattoo he could never explain, a dark scar he felt sure was crucial, though he never spoke of it. Anya traced it with her tongue on their wedding night. Afterwards he asked her never to do that again.   
  
"Where did you get that?" he breathed. Ethan smiled, his eyes hooded.   
  
"We were partners, you and I," he said. "Worshippers of chaos."   
  
Rupert couldn't take his eyes from the tattoo. "That's impossible," he said softly, as though he didn't believe his own assertions. "I have a wife, a son."   
  
"All lies," Ethan said. "You must feel it." And he did, deep in his gut. Anya and Randy had never felt connected to him with the same strong, visceral bond that he already sensed with Ethan. Here was the truth that had lain under the fragile life they'd built, the house of cards they'd constructed. His heart was beating rapidly.   
  
"Come away with me, Ripper," Ethan said, his voice hypnotic. And without knowing quite how it happened, he was walking forward, leaving the shop, loosening his tie as though it were a noose, or a leash.   
  
They cast their first spell that night, a euphoria of power, of release. They left Sunnydale's main street covered in rubble and drove away laughing, top down and wind in their hair.   
  
So this was who he really was, Ripper thought. Interesting.   
  
He lit a cigarette and pressed down on the accelerator.   
  
**********  
  
END  
  
********** 


End file.
